How to Keep Running Strong as You Get Older

Getting older doesn’t have to mean giving up speed, distance or ambitious running goals. In this article Damian Hall will guide you through tips to keep running as you get older.

Yes, our bodies change with age. Recovery can take longer, muscle mass and strength can decline, and maintaining the same level of endurance performance becomes harder. But research into masters athletes suggests that staying active and continuing to train can substantially reduce some of the declines traditionally associated with ageing. (Borges, Nattai et al. 2016)

Speaking to Mel Berry on the VOOM Performance Podcast, ultrarunner, coach and author Damian Hall discussed the research behind his book Run Forever, what happens to runners as they age and, most importantly, what we can do about it.

His message is encouraging: keep moving, keep challenging your body and be prepared to train smarter.

How to Keep Running Strong as You Get Older

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While researching Run Forever, Damian admits that some of the science initially made fairly depressing reading.

Ageing is associated with changes including declining aerobic capacity, muscle mass and strength, alongside changes to bone health, balance and coordination. Endurance performance also eventually declines. A landmark review by Tanaka and Seals found that peak endurance performance tends to be relatively well maintained until around 35, followed by modest decreases until approximately 50–60 before the decline becomes progressively steeper. (Tanaka, H., & Seals, D. R., 2008)

But there’s an important distinction.

Getting older and becoming inactive aren’t the same thing.

Masters athletes provide researchers with an opportunity to separate some of the effects of ageing itself from those caused by increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Research consistently shows that older athletes maintain substantially greater aerobic capacity and muscle function than similarly aged non-exercisers. (Gries, K. J., & Trappe, S. W., 2022)

What Happens to Running Performance as You Get Older?

VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during intense exercise and is one of the major physiological determinants of endurance performance. It naturally declines with age.

However, continuing to train appears to have a significant influence on the rate of that decline.

One longitudinal study followed masters endurance athletes and sedentary adults for around eight years. VO2 max declined by approximately 12% per decade in the sedentary group compared with 5.5% per decade in the masters athletes who continued vigorous endurance training. (Rogers, M A et al,. 1990)

More recent research suggests the picture is complex. A review of masters endurance athletes found substantial variation in VO2 max decline, with changes in training volume explaining a significant amount of the difference between athletes. (Burtscher, Johannes et al., 2022)

As Damian explained on the podcast, maintaining faster running and VO2-max-focused training can therefore remain important as we get older. The message isn’t that training can completely stop ageing.

It’s that continuing to provide your cardiovascular system with a strong training stimulus may help you retain considerably more of your fitness.

Can You Still Improve Your Running as You Age?

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It’s tempting to assume that getting older means everything needs to become slower.

But intensity remains important.

Research into masters athletes suggests reductions in both training volume and training intensity contribute to declining endurance performance with age. (Tanaka, H., & Seals, D. R., 2008)

That doesn’t mean trying to train like you’re 25.

Hard sessions need to be balanced against your ability to recover, but removing intensity altogether may accelerate the loss of the very fitness you’re trying to preserve.

Intervals, hill repetitions and other appropriately programmed higher-intensity sessions can therefore continue to have a place in a masters runner’s programme.

How to Adapt Your Running Training as You Get Older

Running isn’t the only training that matters. As we age, maintaining muscle mass, strength and power becomes increasingly important, both for athletic performance and wider health.

That’s why Damian believes strength training should become a priority rather than something runners squeeze in if they happen to have time.

“It’s so important.”

Strength work can help counter reductions in muscle function while supporting running economy and our ability to produce force. Damian also highlights the wider importance of maintaining muscle and bone health as we age.

Research supports the importance of resistance exercise in older populations, while studies of masters athletes demonstrate that long-term exercise is associated with substantially better preservation of physical function than inactivity. (Mckendry, James et al., 2018)

There’s an interesting lesson specifically for runners, too. A study comparing masters runners with masters Olympic weightlifters found greater bone mineral density and lean mass among the weightlifters, suggesting running alone may not provide the same musculoskeletal stimulus as resistance training. (PubMed)

Damian aims for around two quality strength sessions each week, incorporating exercises such as squats and deadlift-style movements alongside upper-body and core work.

Why Strength Training Is Important for Older Runners

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One of the biggest changes Damian has made is to his running volume. He now runs around 10 miles per week less than he did several years ago. But he hasn’t simply removed that training.

He’s replaced some running with cross-training, allowing him to maintain  a similar overall training volume while reducing some of the repetitive impact on his joints and tendons. It’s an important distinction.

Getting older doesn’t necessarily mean doing less of everything. It can mean becoming smarter about where the training stress comes from. Cycling, swimming, elliptical training and other lower-impact aerobic exercise can potentially maintain cardiovascular training volume without adding another running session.

Why Recovery Matters More as You Age

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Recovery may also need more attention as the years pass. Research into masters athletes suggests ageing may affect recovery following exercise, although the evidence isn’t as straightforward as is sometimes assumed and more research is still needed. (Borges, Nattai et al., 2016).

Damian’s practical advice is to watch what’s actually happening to your body. Are you continually picking up niggles? Are you more tired than usual? Are you struggling to recover between hard sessions?

If the answer is yes, the training pattern that worked ten years ago might no longer be the best one today. Adding recovery doesn’t necessarily mean adding complete rest days. Depending on the athlete, it could mean an easy run, lower-impact cross-training or complete rest.

The goal is ultimately consistency. 

A slightly smaller training week that you can repeat for months is likely to be more productive than continually pushing beyond your ability to recover.

Nutrition for Older Runners: Fuel Enough to Perform

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Bone health becomes another important consideration for masters runners.

A 2024 review highlighted that bone stress injuries in older runners can involve both traditional overuse and age-related reductions in bone strength. The authors emphasised appropriate physical activity, good nutrition, biomechanics and sufficient recovery as important considerations for protecting bone health. (Raiser, Sara N et al., 2024)

This is particularly relevant because simply running more isn’t necessarily the answer.

Strength training, appropriate nutrition and managing overall training load all form part of the bigger picture.

Protein and Muscle Recovery for Older Runners

Training is only one side of the equation. Drawing on the nutrition section of Run Forever, written with sports dietitian Renee McGregor, Damian emphasises getting the fundamentals right: a balanced diet containing sufficient carbohydrate, protein and micronutrient-rich foods.

For Damian, one of the biggest changes during his ultrarunning career has been his attitude towards carbohydrate. When he entered the sport, low-carbohydrate and fasted approaches were popular. Heading out for several hours with little fuel was sometimes actively encouraged.

Today, his approach is very different.

“Definitely the better I fuelled, the better I performed.”

Fuelling long runs properly doesn’t just provide energy during the session. Damian identifies three reasons for doing it: better training performance, better recovery and the opportunity to train your stomach for race day. When asked for the biggest nutrition mistake he sees among runners, his answer was straightforward: Underfuelling.

How to Reduce Your Risk of Running Injuries as You Age

There’s another side to ageing that physiology papers can’t completely capture. You may eventually lose some outright speed, but you’re simultaneously accumulating years of experience. Damian calls this the “age advantage”.

Experienced runners may have greater patience, perspective and problem-solving skills. They’ve learned how their bodies respond when things start going wrong, how to pace themselves and when pushing harder is likely to make things worse.

That’s particularly valuable in ultrarunning.

Damian points to experienced ultrarunner Ian Keith, who told him that almost everything about racing had become better with age, except his speed. When an event lasts 24, 48 or even more hours, experience can compensate for a lot.

Running After 40 and 50: Consistency Matters More Than Ever

Eventually, lifetime PBs may become harder to achieve. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean the exciting part of your running career is over. Damian suggests changing the definition of success. That might mean age-group PBs rather than lifetime records. Or it might mean moving away from the stopwatch and towards completely new challenges.

Run further. Explore somewhere new. Enter your first ultra. Take on an adventure where the finish means considerably more than the number displayed on your watch. Damian himself remains an impressive example. At 49, he won both the Lakeland 100 and Northern Traverse, while increasingly gravitating towards longer events where outright speed becomes less important.

How to Keep Running as You Get Older

The science and Damian’s experience point in much the same direction:

1. Keep training consistently. Lifelong exercise can substantially attenuate many of the physiological declines associated with inactivity and ageing.
2. Don’t abandon intensity. Appropriately programmed faster running can help maintain aerobic capacity.
3. Strength train. Maintaining muscle, strength and bone health becomes increasingly important.
4. Manage impact. Cross-training can help maintain aerobic volume while reducing repetitive running load.
5. Prioritise recovery. Pay attention to fatigue and recurring niggles rather than blindly following the training you did ten years ago.
6. Fuel properly. Give your body enough carbohydrate to train and recover, alongside sufficient protein and a balanced overall diet.
7. Use your experience. You may lose some speed, but pacing, judgement and problem-solving can improve.
8. Change your goals, not your ambition.

Ageing will affect running performance. The science doesn’t suggest we can stop that completely. But it increasingly suggests there’s a huge difference between getting older and stopping training.

Masters athletes continue to push the boundaries of what was once considered possible in later life, and maintaining a strong training stimulus appears to be one of the most important factors in limiting age-related decline. (Lepers, R., & Stapley, P. J., 2016)

You might not be the same runner you were at 25.

That doesn’t mean the best adventures of your running life are behind you.

Scientific references

Key research informing this article includes Valenzuela et al.’s review of lifelong endurance exercise and VO2 max decline; Tanaka & Seals’ review of endurance performance in masters athletes; Borges et al.’s review of ageing and recovery; and recent research specifically examining bone health in masters runners.

View the VO2 max and lifelong endurance exercise study on PubMed
View the masters endurance performance review on PubMed
View the masters athlete recovery review on PubMed
View the bone health and masters runners review on PubMed